Jul 26, 2021 — From the smartphones in our hands to the big data centers powering the internet, from self-driving cars to robotic surgical systems — inside each is a tiny piece of technology that makes it all possible: a semiconductor.

Billions being invested in semiconductors across the globe. Intel is spending $20 billion to double down on chip manufacturing, South Korea is joining the global chipmaking race with a $450 billion spending plan, even Bosch, a tier-1 Automotive supplier, is building its own chip fab – these are just a few examples of big investments.

Infrastructure will play a critical role in enabling organizations to maximize return on these investments. Semiconductor design is essentially a high-performance computing (HPC) workload and is massively parallel. As the number of concurrent jobs increases, they often place the underlying infrastructure under tremendous stress, forcing unprecedented growth in essential IT resources such as compute, networking, and storage. A decade ago, CPU performance was a barrier, and the industry relied more on concurrent processes and CPUs with more cores. As total cores grew, the bottleneck shifted to storage.

Dell Technologies has set a new standard for unlocking the potential of semiconductor design tool performance with Dell EMC PowerScale Storage. The PowerScale family, with its scale-out architecture, is optimized for HPC, providing the performance and efficiency needed to take on the challenges of supporting extreme workloads. The PowerScale all-flash platform – powered by the PowerScale OneFS operating system – provides a powerful scale-out storage architecture for fast access to data to speed up verification and regression tests to meet time-to-market pressures.